Hanover police on Sunday afternoon, by the car that later drew a state bomb squad’s attention. All photos © Eric Francis.
HANOVER - Police in Hanover have obtained an arrest warrant for the Wisconsin woman who poured caustic chemicals over her car Sunday in a parking lot on the Dartmouth College campus, prompting a lengthy response by firefighters and the New Hampshire State Police Bomb Squad.
Hanover Police Captain Michael Shibuola said Friday that Angela Sporer, 50, of Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin turned herself in to police on Thursday evening.
The arrest warrant seeks to charge Sporer with both disorderly conduct and depositing “offensive matter.” The latter charge pertains to her actions in allegedly pouring a “substance liable to become putrid or offensive, or injurious to the public health” on and in her car as it sat in the parking lot Sunday behind Dartmouth’s main student dining hall—the Class of 1953 Commons on Mass Row.
The car was also plastered with signs that appeared to contain lewd references to gender identification and individuals with AIDS.
Messages that were plainly visible on the car’s windows underlie an “offensive material” charge in the arrest warrant for its owner.
Court records in Sporer’s home state show that she has filed a series of federal lawsuits in recent years, all of which have been dismissed on various grounds, with one federal judge going so far as to write that “if she continues to file lawsuits over which this court has no jurisdiction, or that are frivolous, malicious, or fail to state a claim” that she could be fined and be barred from filing lawsuits in the future.
The records also show that Sporer at various times tried to sue three different Wisconsin police departments, a family court, a hospital, and the state’s department of children and families “alleging her children were removed in 2013, sexually exploited while wards of the state, contracted HIV/AIS and that various state actors failed to prevent or remedy the harm.”
On Sunday, first responders made contact with Sporer shortly after she was seen pouring what smelled like ammonia both inside and outside her small black car just after 11 a.m., but they said she “refused to provide information” about the chemicals she had released.
Hanover Fire Lieutenant Robert Mousley looks over the car’s contents on Sunday.
Hanover Police said that Sporer was “employed by a third party” that had hired her to work temporarily at the college, although they did not indicate exactly where she worked or what she was doing at Dartmouth.
After she was taken by a Hanover ambulance crew to DHMC for a mental health evaluation it took nearly eight hours to render the vehicle safe before a search was conducted that concluded there were no explosive devices materials inside her vehicle.
Police said “multiple types of household cleaning products were found in the vehicle,” adding that “minute quantities of dangerous gas levels were detected inside the vehicle which was ventilated and metered until determined to be safe.”
Editor’s note: This story has been edited to add that Sporer turned herself in on Thursday evening, 10/23, and to update the description of the charges to clarify that the “offensive matter” charge pertained to the substance(s) Sporer allegedly poured on her car, not the display of lewd signs in a place where they could potentially be seen by minors.